League of Legends

Frater Perdurabo · Post by **Frater Perdurabo** » Thu Jan 28, 2010 6:31 am

Does anyone here play it? I gave in to my brother's pressure and started recently and it's lots more fun than I had anticipated.

League of Legends is a standalone free to play DOTA clone. Lots of elements that really annoyed me about DOTA have been removed.
No more denying.
No more gold loss upon death.
Games also tend to be a lot quicker, with most lasting between 25-45min, 30min being a good avarage thus far.
A surrender option.
Very noob friendly - there is also a tutorial that explains the basic game mechanics.
Matchmaking system that pits players of equal skill against each other. The process is quick and keeps track of leavers etc.
If you have a shitty internet (like me), you can rejoin the game after getting disconnected.
Whenever someone leaves or gets disconnected, rest of the team gets 10% more experience.
Every hero in the game gets two universal skills that can be picked from a list of 15 or so. Examples include, Heal, Cleanse, Cripple, etc.
In addition, every hero also has a Teleport to Town skill so you won't need to buy those pesky scrolls like in DOTA.
New gameplay element is bushes: you can hide in bushes and everyone outside a bush won't see you. Adds a lot to tactical gameplay.
The shop has been revamped, items are cheaper, less powerful and easier to acquire.
There is also a list of recommended items for each hero to help newcomers.

In addition, League of Legends has an account system.
Every time you play a game, your account gets experience and levels up. Per level up, you get a Mastery point that can be allocated into any of three trees (like talent trees in WoW) which give you minute bonuses, either Offense, Defense or Utility. The bonuses are really minor, i.e. ones that modify a spell or add something like crit (2% extra crit for 4 points)

While it is free to play, you only get about 10 free heros which change every week. However, you can buy heros for points that you get from just playing the game. An estimate: about 10 games played will let you afford a low-mid price hero. However, if you want to, you can buy a bundle of heros or skins, a single hero, etc. They are really quite cheap, just a few dollars per avarage hero.

If you haven't played DOTA before, it will probably take you a while to get used to this game and you'll spend some time sucking, but that's ok, there are loads of noobs who have just started playing as well, so you will not be overwhelemed by imbalanced teams. I highly recommend this game.

jetbaby · Post by **jetbaby** » Thu Jan 28, 2010 8:07 am

Micro-transaction gaming is as bad for gaming as consoles.

Yonmanc · Post by **Yonmanc** » Fri Jan 29, 2010 5:46 am

Looks a lot like Warcraft 3, art style-wise. Especially the trees.

Stainless · Post by **Stainless** » Sat Jan 30, 2010 1:25 am

Not a fan. Most of the advances (like rejoining after DC) are in HoN, and some of those pluses, aren't really pluses to me. The double skill thing means every fgt walks around with a heal, there's an insane amount of healing ability in heroes in that game, and it just gets dull. No denying, is silly. Game length is also not that much of a bonus, since last time I looked, my average HoN game goes for 37min.

Frater Perdurabo · Post by **Frater Perdurabo** » Sat Jan 30, 2010 1:42 pm

Heal is actually one of the weaker skills in the game. Yeah, sure, it can be useful in the first 10 minutes but after that, it just becomes obsolete.

I personally like no denying, otherwise it just gets too tedious.

Superhaze · Post by **Superhaze** » Tue Feb 02, 2010 12:28 pm

its just a tower-defence online game, but its pretty fucking good at that. +1
I had lots of fun playing Corki, and heimerdinger, but with the weekly change in free characters I have decided to just get enough points so I can "buy" a permanent character instead.

Post by **King of Creation** » Tue Feb 02, 2010 12:40 pm

Speaking of tower defense games, I didn't realize until the other day that Feargus Urquhart was the man behind Castles 2: Siege and Conquest

Frater Perdurabo · Post by **Frater Perdurabo** » Tue Feb 02, 2010 1:22 pm

Superhaze wrote:its just a tower-defence online game, but its pretty fucking good at that. +1
I had lots of fun playing Corki, and heimerdinger, but with the weekly change in free characters I have decided to just get enough points so I can "buy" a permanent character instead.

I just bought some Riot points so that I could save up all my IP. At level 20, you can buy the best runes in the game and they cost about 800 each. I'm currently playing Twitch and enjoy him a lot.